Since I Laid My Burden Down Read online

  One day the warehouse was to be evicted. There was a closing punk show to destroy the whole structure. DeShawn was wasted off his ass and came into the garage to watch a hardcore band play, and noticed the drummer was a cute little guy; the band sucked to all hell, but the drummer piqued his interest. Right as he moved to get a better look some random gutter punk crashed into him while moshing, and instinctively DeShawn punched him in the face, hard. A fight broke out, the band stopped playing, and the two were pulled away. His nose was bleeding.

  DeShawn went outside to pull himself together and felt a tap on the back; it was the drummer.

  “Yeah, I hate gutter punks,” he said as he handed DeShawn a red kerchief from his back pocket.

  DeShawn, drunk off his ass, grabbed the boy by the face and started making out with him. The boy kissed him back.

  “Let’s go to my room,” said DeShawn.

  “Okay,” said the drummer boy, giggling. “Don’t you even wanna ask me my name?”

  DeShawn rolled his eyes. “Okay, since it’s so important to you—what’s your fucking name?”

  “I’m Arnold,” he stated calmly, then giggled. “You’re DeShawn. Everyone knows who you are.”

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  Back in Alabama, in the months after Uncle’s funeral, DeShawn had almost played out whatever he needed to play out. It had happened that DeShawn was fooling around with Andre in his mom’s living room one weekday morning while Andre’s mom was at work. DeShawn was giving him a blow job and Andre took a video of the illicit act and saved it to his phone. The video went into an online cloud his mother could access, and Andre’s mom called DeShawn’s mom to let her know he was fucking her underage son. Right about a day later, as it was about to hit full-blown scandal, a phone call stole the thunder from the coming storm.

  DeShawn’s aunt called him from Harlem to let him know his biological father was dead. He would have to come to New York to clean out his dad’s apartment, and help prepare things before his father’s body went back to Alabama to be buried.

  Oh lord, here we go, thought DeShawn as the plane peeled off the runway in Nashville en route to LaGuardia.

  He went from the plane straight to Brooklyn. He would stay at his girlfriend’s house to take the stress off his aunt in Harlem. Or rather, that was what was supposed to happen. DeShawn listened raptly as his girlfriend sat on a couch, got wasted, and bitched about the man she had been quasi-dating for eight years. She lamented that he hadn’t asked to marry her, that he had a baby now, that he hadn’t blah blah blahed. It took all his concentration not to fucking go off on her.

  He met her in San Francisco, and they both had been punks in their youth. She confused him with all this ennui, and he wondered how the fuck she had enough faith left in men to expect anything from them. DeShawn looked at the pantheon of men in his life—all the fathers, uncles, fuck buddies, fake boyfriends, whatever—and they all felt like a void. They appeared out of nowhere and disappeared the same way, a puff of smoke. He was learning how not to want.

  DeShawn had been drinking with his girlfriend for twelve hours straight. They both started bawling at an episode of an annoying black sitcom (some gay son on the show was having problems fitting into society so, naturally, they had to cry) and DeShawn got the notion to leave. His girlfriend, wasted off her ass, decided she didn’t want him to go and started a long, abusive tirade. “Why does every man feel like he gets to disappoint me?!” It got so out of line DeShawn called the police on her, but soon realized he was drunk and yelling at a white woman in her own apartment. He knew what some New York cops were capable of; those egregious bastards would certainly barbecue his black ass for this one. He flew the coop, and it hit him that he just lost his father and now his best friend too. He had wanted to avoid staying at his father’s place, but with nowhere to go he took the train to Harlem, to his father’s abandoned apartment.

  DeShawn’s biological father and mother had met at a quaint, historically black college in Alabama—the same one Sun-Ra had been rumored to attend. They were never married; DeShawn had been a love child. And so his father had kept his distance. He was there for two weeks every summer, two weeks at Christmas, and some arbitrary spots here and there throughout the year. DeShawn remembered being about seven and his mother taking him down to southern Alabama to meet his father in some random hotel room by the highway.

  His father was recovering from a gunshot wound and was living in DC at the time. “I was in DC buying crack, son,” he explained to young DeShawn. “I was buying it from a boy not much older than you, guess he musta been bout twelve, I’ll say. The bullet is still in me.” DeShawn’s father took his little boy’s hand and rubbed it across his thigh; DeShawn could feel the bullet in his femur bone. His father felt like some sort of superhero.

  DeShawn’s father was not a peaceful man.

  He always drank hard liquor when driving. Once when DeShawn came to visit him in Lamison as a boy, his father got drunk and wrecked the car they were riding in. The man and boy had to walk through the woods back to DeShawn’s grandparents’ house. “Are there werewolves, Daddy?” DeShawn asked. “There sure the fuck are, son. They’re gonna get us any moment,” said his dad. DeShawn held on to his dad’s hand with an iron grip.

  His father could be a complete asshole at times, which told DeShawn he came by this shared trait honestly. There were several times when his father drove them around the back roads of Alabama, nursing a cup of whiskey though strangely never swerving (he was quite a responsible drunk driver), and saying whatever the fuck came to his mind. “Me and your mother couldn’t be together because your mother’s a fucking whore,” he often said. DeShawn was quite a bit older before he learned that a father should never talk to his little son this way, but DeShawn’s papa was a man of few formalities.

  One day after driving around, DeShawn’s dad got even more drunk and took his son on a speedboat, and they sped and raised hell all over the Alabama River that afternoon. Later that night his father did what he always did when leaving his son alone in the pickup to get more liquor. “All right son, here’s my gun.” He handed teenage DeShawn a loaded handgun. “If any nigga comes starting shit you shoot ’um in his asshole, and when I get back I’ll shoot ’um again.” DeShawn hated the gun, and would always set it down and pretend it wasn’t there.

  DeShawn’s father left Alabama some five years ago to move near his sister in Harlem. He also wanted to write.

  Now, DeShawn had seen the signs that his dad was getting old before his years. He had been drinking heavily since his early teens, and when he turned middle-aged his health was already failing. The man had started to call DeShawn during blackouts; he would complain that his heart hurt, that people were poisoning him. He began calling his son and asking him to move closer, saying that they should get to know each other, that they had been estranged too long. DeShawn, then in his twenties, was having too much fun making mistakes in the Golden State to even consider it. “Dad’s drunk again,” he would say to himself when he received one of his calls. Then there were the times his father would call and be straight up belligerent and combative. All deep alcoholics are hard people to take care of and relate to. DeShawn wanted to forgive him, and he usually did.

  He opened the door to his father’s apartment. It was a small studio near 116th and Morningside. The smell hit him first. It was his father’s smell—pork mixed with cheap cologne mixed with alcohol. It was a punch to the senses, and DeShawn wept. Dad’s still here, he thought.

  The apartment was a mess. DeShawn’s aunt told him about the minor heart surgery his father kept secret from him, but from the looks of the apartment it hadn’t caused him to alter his lifestyle. There were loose Viagra pills all over the floor, alcohol in the kitchen, and three five-gallon jars of pickled pigs feet—his papa’s favorite snack. These were all things contraband for a man with a weak heart. DeShawn’s aunt explained. “Your father was ignoring his doctor’s orders. We learned he had several stops at the
emergency room a couple months before he died. He was depressed.”

  DeShawn put his father on a stretcher in his mind. He wanted to examine him. Here was a man who grew up with twelve siblings and watched his parents live to be ninety. He knew in his heart of hearts he did not want to be an old man. DeShawn was his raging spawn, psychically linked. He partied just like Daddy. The man must have seen his health failing, and all he had was himself and a quasi-estranged son in California. Who would have taken care of him if he lived to get old? DeShawn began to understand what the late-night phone calls demanding he move back were really about.

  In the bathroom was another indication of his father’s fear of mortality. The tub was stained dark with black hair dye, caked so hard it took days and a gallon of bleach to correct. DeShawn grayed early in his youth, and remembered his father freaking out about it, demanding he dye his hair immediately. Now DeShawn understood that it wasn’t about his gray hair, it was more about his father having a son who was old enough to have gray hair. That vain fucking bastard, DeShawn laughed to himself.

  The only tidy thing in the man’s apartment was on top of his dresser—all the newspaper clippings and press DeShawn received as an emerging artist, all lined up in a row. The last thing he remembered his father saying to him, two months before he died, was that he was sorry they had gotten into whatever fight during the previous phone call, and that he loved him. This much would have to be closure.

  DeShawn’s dad had been an atheist for as long as he could remember. His father made fun of him for going to church. “I can’t believe that your mama lets you believe in that bullshit! You and the rest of them niggas sitting around in church giving that preacher money, thinking a white man is floating around in space and gonna punish you. It’s disgraceful!” Saying it as if he were spitting out something horrible.

  But as time came on, his father was alone, and like all dying men, started going to church—to find a wife, DeShawn suspected, as that’s where all the middle-aged, divorced black women tend to congregate. On the first floor of his father’s apartment was a Baptist church. DeShawn had partied to the gods one Saturday night and then rolled out the door on Sunday morning with bleached blond hair and Daisy Dukes, with all the women in the church side-eyeing him as if he were a burning bundle of sticks. He had been there two weeks at this point, and knew he wasn’t gonna be able to stomach too many more inquisitive looks from these good God-fearing assholes.

  He didn’t dismiss the Holy Rollers, though. DeShawn had his theories about it all. He would look at any moving body of water, a breeze stirring dead leaves, or a person singing to themselves in public, and he would get it. It wasn’t hard to be reminded of God, or whatever the fuck one calls it. The feeling was everywhere; the problem was the million other moments of the day lacking this scale of epiphany. DeShawn trudged through the world with that hole in his heart, something missing. It was many things, but his father was one of them. He had been a ghost for years, but him actually being dead now made his absence more three-dimensional.

  DeShawn didn’t know how to explain his father—a man he called Father, but a man who was never really prepared to be one. Like so many men, it seemed like he’d just said, Well, I have a dick—guess I should be a dad, and learned soon thereafter his mistake. DeShawn grew up disbelieving in men, and perhaps vis-à-vis grew up disbelieving in himself. Either way, he went on the plane back to Alabama. The body was to be put in the ground.

  DeShawn was always amused by how fucking drunk his dad’s side of the family could get. The first night they congregated, they all got bombed on pineapple margaritas and DeShawn had to stop his two aunts from coming to blows, and had to stop himself from beating up his cousin. No ill will—they always forgave each other in the sober mornings. On the way to the church, DeShawn’s younger, cool, fag-loving aunt gave him forty-three Klonopin and some sound advice: “Don’t overdose, bitch.”

  Before the caravan left, it hit the boy hard. Dad is gone. He fell to the floor and cried until his older, more practical aunt came to get him. “Now, baby,” she said, very lovingly, “Auntie’s knees is bad and I can’t come down there and get you. You got to be a big boy and collect your-goddamn-self.” DeShawn got stuck at the words “be a big boy.” In her head he was still probably five years old.

  One of DeShawn’s messier aunts whispered to him during the service, “You know, there sure are some sad hoes at this funeral,” and motioned with her head to all the women in the small town his dad dated as a younger man. They were all sitting on the nonfamily side of the church.

  DeShawn’s father’s side of the family was Lutheran, so the service was not like it would be on his mother’s Baptist side. No drama or emotion, just stark plain and how-do-you-do. His father’s suit matched the casket, and DeShawn was a pallbearer. He wanted a hand in carrying his father to peace. He watched them lower his Papa Bear into the ground.

  DeShawn and his fag-loving aunt went and got drunk in her pickup truck after the service. He popped one of the pills she gave him. All DeShawn could think was, My daddy is dead, long live my daddy.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Deshawn woke up in a dark hotel room; staring at the whirling mass of blackness, he contemplated the void. Andre’s dried cum was all over DeShawn’s stomach, chest, and the edge of his mouth. It had been a fun reunion, though weighted. He felt parched and walked to the bathroom sink to clear his throat. He could feel his bad breath.

  He turned on the light in the bathroom and saw the sleeping youth lying on his stomach, naked on the bed, Andre’s lungs heaving up and down in a rhythmic sleep pattern. He felt like Psyche gazing on Eros for the last time.

  He had been in New York for too long and had lost the boy’s attention. The day before he flew back home to Alabama, he got a call from Andre saying that he had “finally accepted the Lord’s call to preach,” and that he had been “playing around with the spirit too much.” He had found a girl his own age to date. Andre couldn’t stop rambling about how he finally had a chance at the normal life God wanted for him.

  He met DeShawn at a nearby Motel 6 off I-65 “one last time,” and per usual they fucked like animals.

  DeShawn gained some relief in this meeting. Andre’s mother wasn’t going to call the cops on him. Their fooling around was actually not that much of a scandal in a small town that had known so much. It was just another thing that happened, and it was on to the next.

  When DeShawn looked at Andre all he could think was, This young man doesn’t know himself very well. He stopped short after he thought it. He knew he was projecting.

  DeShawn looked in the mirror and all he saw was a man who had been absent from himself. It was a learned behavior. Years of encounters like these hadn’t left him hollow, but there was a feeling that his sexual self was, more often than not, on autopilot. Experience is the only teacher, really, and one can rack up an enormous bill along the way. DeShawn’s PhD in Whoreology cost him, and he would be paying for some time. He didn’t lament though—he held tight to the one thing his experiences had afforded him: wisdom. He gained knowledge of both other people and himself. The kind he wouldn’t have had access to had he been locked away in some boyfriend’shouse or the confinement of celibacy. To DeShawn, this wisdom was worth its weight in gold.

  He wondered when his real life would begin, when it wouldn’t seem like a mixtape of disappointments he was either enduring or surviving.

  His life and the men he encountered, the quest for their presence, felt like a series of random treasure maps he followed for no reason other than for something to do.

  He would get the map, sail across the ocean, make it to the deserted island, dock the boat and swim to shore, cut through a jungle, find where “X” marked the spot, dig up twelve feet of dirt, and finally find the treasure chest. Only to open it and find another set of instructions. He was often told never to look for love—“It’ll come to you”—but he personally couldn’t think of one great explorer who had ever found anything by
not looking for it. DeShawn thought about how comfortable people were with dropping platitudes as undisputed truth.

  Sometimes he felt he had looked too much. It was like searching for the Fountain of Youth, or the City of Gold, a useless pastime. All he found was the Book of Excuses, written by every lover.

  “It’s not the right time,” or, “I would love you more if you were less like yourself,” or his particular favorite, “Don’t expect shit out of me—ever.” There were so many people offering nothing and treating that nothing like it was a prize to be fought over. DeShawn felt like a veteran of some weird war who fought bravely and gallantly for nothing.

  DeShawn dressed, left the youth sleeping in the room, and walked next door to the Waffle House. He wanted a waffle, and to clear his head.

  He knew that though he had always wanted something out of these men, he couldn’t ever really figure what. Or maybe it wasn’t the men, but a feeling. It was always this thing that felt unexplained and out of reach. He couldn’t picture it, and it scared him. He learned from a meditator friend of his that if you can’t picture it with your mind, you can’t achieve it. DeShawn longed for nice surprises, because there were things his mind couldn’t sketch.

  He made a list.

  Many men had died or simply vanished from his life—Jatius McClansy, Arnold, Skylar, his father, his stepfather, the list went on. He made a list of the pros and cons of all these men. He noticed that the last con for each of them was, He never really loved me.

  He drew another list with their names. The title of this list was, “What Would I Have Gained If They Had Loved Me.” DeShawn stared at the sheet, blank as a white wall, until the waitress came up and asked if he was okay.

  The only thing he could think to write was, A sense of victory. It seemed like a pathetic reason. It was a pathetic reason.